


Souvenirs

by zvezda



Category: Remember Me (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 07:16:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zvezda/pseuds/zvezda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nilin was intrinsic to his existence.  He couldn't forget her.  She was everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Old House

_Caramel fingers tangled in his mouse-brown hair._

_Scissors snipped near his ears. Trickles of sensation down his collar bones. He watched her through the mirror, and she was unspeakably lovely. Even with her tired eyes and smudged make-up, the ruined angel avoided his gaze._

_He tilted his unshaven cheek toward her hand, weeping, and the scissors cut his cheek just enough to sting._

\------

Neo-Paris was lost in a time of grief and terror. Memories, long lost in the depths of the Cartier-Wells catacombs, flooded the minds of those who'd forgotten them. Men and women were forced to recall their personal tragedies and even some not even their own. Suicides sky-rocketed, as those who couldn't bear to live with them took their own lives rather than suffer the recollection. The city of Neo-Paris was rocked by the aftershocks of the great Awakening. Human existence had been redefined by man's ingenuity. 

The woman behind it, the one responsible, whose face had been well-known since her wild escape from La Bastille, couldn't stomach the outcry. She was no governing force. She had no heart for leadership. She was the one who followed the voice that had guided her, guided her hand that could reach into people's minds and alter the very fabric of who they were.

"What do I do now?" she whispered as she huddled in her old bedroom beneath microfiber blankets, watching the frantic chaos ensue on her AR news feed.   
No one answered. Her Sensen crackled and buzzed, knocked out of syncronization with the system. The news came in spurts, using the only clear channel left owned by her family's local program. Gone was the face of the old newscast, the pretty blonde and risque shock-factor commentary slighted to favor the extremist anti-Errorist views of the privileged.

Her parents worked tirelessly to help those live with their memories again. They were proud of her, and told her so daily. But what comfort could they offer their only daughter, meaning well, when their every emotion and action reflected a lie she had designed? Their memories had come back, too. But the ones she had touched, those stayed. Those remained a quietly manufactured alteration.   
Nothing was as authentic as the screams and wails and cries of the city below. Perhaps she would have believed her parents loved her if she had remembered it the way they did. 

If only she could plunge into her own mind, twist herself into the glad and happy woman she needed to be.

Yes, I will take leadership. I will do this great honor and stand with my mother and father and undo the decades of mental and emotional damage they've done to thousands.

When she looked at them, all she felt was sick and as empty as the databanks where Edge had lived.

_I murdered my friend - for you._

Her parents even threw money at her, so to speak; she now possessed a small fortune in a private account, whose access was solely hers. A quadruple-firewall protection system, encryupted password protection - anything she needed, they gave it to her. She was the Cartier-Wells heiress, after all.  
She had no reason to say no. Accepting, however, still felt like robbery.

It was hard to think. There was so much background noise, so many glitches. Every Sensen equipped to every person malfunctioned in some way or another. Hers only seemed to continue to work, just to pick up the latent disarray that everyone else was in.

"There's no way to disconnect," her father said, "without shutting it off. And you wouldn't be able to use your glove any more."

Why would I have to? she wanted to ask. But she left it on. She lay awake night after night, listening to discordant wails and cries and prayers.

If Edge could put up with all this time, then I'll survive it. 

Edge had been clever enough to orchestrate every moment, every step of her life, to end the suffering of mankind. Or begin it. He must have known the damage was worth the risk; she had to believe he had cared about people on some level. Or maybe he hated them, for being so selfish and self-absorbed as to cleanse their minds of unsavory memories. All that mattered to him was liberation from man's suffering. The sole recepticle for their pain and agony had become their living martyr.

How dare you leave me like this, she thought while she clutched her tear-soaked pillow. All of this, all of it, and to me, how dare you, how could you?  
Whenever sleep crept upon her, she fought with him over again - endless battles with his mindless rage. Nothing calculating and calm any more - as insane and insensate as the Leapers. She saw his visage, glitching red and enormous, rise from a cloud of discarded memories; he descended on her and he devoured her completely, leaving her sitting up with sweat-stained clothes clinging to her tired body.

Last night was the last night she would spend in her parents' ivory tower, locked away from the common folk even though their voices could reach her.  
Charles burst in from his study, working late; her father's face dark with worry and fear. She could almost hear the words before they came out of his mouth.

"No! No!" She shoved him. "Get out! I won't let you take the only piece of him I have! I want to remember!"

She slammed the door, then sagged to the cold marble floor, pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She knew enough that someday, she'd remember Edge differently. The mind alone had its ways to spare her from pain, to change the way she would remember it. She would look back on him someday more fondly. She knew that intrinsic piece of knowledge should have helped her stop the deep, choking sobs that left her on the floor. 

That didn't help.

Like all of those in Neo-Paris, she, too, had to suffer. Maybe, deep down, she wanted to.

\----

The next day, she arranged transportation to leave Neo-Paris. To go anywhere. She took a fake name, changed her hair, wore different clothes, and bunched herself into a coach-class shipment of refugees heading to England. From London, she would continue on to Sweden. She desperately yearned for someplace cold and isolated. Sweden had sounded nice. Her parents owned a cottage, solar-powered, and utterly self-sufficient.

She had been awake for almost two days by the time a cab had driven her through long, sweeping landscapes. Kiruna was the northern-most town in Sweden, and in the distant paste renowned for mining iron. Now, however, her parents owned a chunk of its land complete with a house - all angles and large glass windows - that had a perfect view for the Northern Lights over the local national park.

Some local Swedish architext had built the house for a foreign thespian who ended up hating the house completely. The property was bought by her parents.

It was isolated enough but close enough to buy supplies and fresh food if necessary. She wouldn't be able to hear anyone for miles. All she had to do was calibrate her Sensen to the house mainframe, and all she would ever hear would be the average indoor temperature, the outdoor weather, and other various automated functions throughout the house.

It was a wonder of stonework, carpentry, and modern technology. She liked it because nothing in the house looked synthetic or metal - everything looked like natural fixtures of a simpler time. She briefly remembered coming here as a very young child once, running along the wooden floors, the wide open sun room facing the midnight sun. The house had seemed magical to her.

Some of the magic was gone with the mystery, but it was what she needed for now.

She collapsed into the bed without setting her Sensen alarm and slept like the dead.

On the one hand, she felt like a coward. But she couldn't stay another moment in Neo-Paris without the enroaching possibility of catching a similar kind of Leaper madness.

She got up the next evening and wandered the house as if in a drug-induced glaze. The foyer, the white popcorn ceiling, the fireplace's natural stonework as captivating as the next. She heated a package of self-marinating chicken and rice and ate it right out of its shiny metal package, piping hot. She took a shower, fiddling with the system to adjust the temperature and save the settings, standing in the multi-directional spray and doing her best to think about nothing. Her head hurt. It was a constant and welcome distraction.

She spent two days eating prepackaged meals before she went into Kiruna driving the house vehicle to shop.

She stocked up on fresh vegetables, fruits, packaged meats and spices. She spent a small fortune buying locally, but she couldn't help herself. She loved the small farmstand outside. There wasn't even an AR sign in sight - what she percieved with her eyes was entirely real. Hand-painted little signs written in messy Swedish alone would tell her what she was buying.

The world seemed so much calmer here. Simpler. She would have gone into the busier part of the city but she couldn't stand the date being fed to her. She wanted nothing to do with it, though its churring had become so much louder without the ambiance. 

"I wish I could imagine a time where these things... didn't exist." She reached around the crown of her skull, sliding her fingers along the tenderness against the back of her neck. A hot cup of coffee steamed in front of her, and she stared from the windows. Loneliness gnawed at her. 

Inevitably, she thought of Edge again. Bags of groceries sat on the center island in the kitchen. She'd dug out fresh coffee grounds and fixed a small cup, and then her interest in domestic affairs waned.

"You would have liked it here."

She lifted the mug to her lips, the warmth of it grounding her. Then a distant star opened up for her, and she resisted. Then she began to peel open her inner eye to see it, to let the memory blossom, afraid of what might be waiting. To her pleasant surprise, it was nothing as horrible as she thought.

She's a little girl. Her footsteps echo as she darts between the familiar banks of computer and wire, mountains of data, trillions of megabytes of people's memories humming and alive around her. This is H3O, all around her, but her nameless friend waits beyond. Nilin the Errorist is afraid; he will devour her, like always - a monster made of lies and sorrow and rage.

She waits, but nothing happens. She sees herself sit down cross-legged and begin to chatter away.

She describes the house. "It's so big," she says, "and beautiful, and you can see these lovely ribbons in the sky, so many colors, I wish you could have seen it."

It was a wonder she ever remained so innocent. The simplest things had thrilled her, made her so happy. She was ever so eager to share that happiness with that mysterious figure who haunted her reality.

He had always seemed just a little too sad. A little too lonely. She'd wanted to share things with him that might make him smile, as fruitless as the effort seemed. He looked like a boy to her; a little boy who never grew older.

Tears spattered the pine table. She blinked at the coffee, cold in her mug, unable to remember how long she'd been crying. Her Sensen told her she'd been sitting still for an hour. 

"Damn you, Edge."

\-----

Freedom comes with its usual price. As one fades away, another is born. Or rather, transferred. In that process, so much was scrubbed away, broken off and lost. Existence on a knife point, residing betwixt the ether of mindless empty cyber space and the bursting light of self-awareness, was not kind on a fragile, single entity. He clung to the threads of memoriel content that he replayed in the millions in single seconds of time, imprinting them and clinging to the meaning attached to each one, each precious jewel of light on a spider web of connections and associations. Photographs touched by the greasy fingers of time, blurred further and further with each revisit.

All of it meaningless without the singular keystone at its center: Nilin Cartier-Wells.

"I'm afraid, Edge."

"As am I, Sister."

I am afraid. I don't want to die.

Nilin. Nilin, I don't want to be alone. Your memory gave me the first taste of toxic despair. And something more, something elusive that I can't name.  
Her vibrant blue eyes mirrored back at him, from a frozen stand-still screen that twitched between one frame and the next. Her gaze locked onto him, tears brimming in her eyes but such vicious determination to have all of it end.

The fragments of himself collided in misery, screaming. Silence burned back at him; floundering between currents of information, he could only safely spiral in a circular eddy that offered him micro-eons to linger on her face, the sound of her voice, the taste of her memory. And only hers, not caked and crammed with the misery of mankind. Hers alone.

The sadness and loneliness of a neglected child.

A little girl's salty tears.

I was your first real friend, little sister. 

Oh, Nilin, Nilin.

Find me. Hear me.

I don't want to be alone, either.

And as if she could hear, as if she could concievably dream of him, he heard a breath of air in the void, a shimmer of thought and light. He reached out for it, embracing it, coiling himself into it, threading himself through it. Greedily latching onto it like a lamprey and suckling at its meaning.

I miss you.

Enlightenment burst through him, shattering him. He screamed, his voice breaking against the confines of space. Yes, this, this is the sensation, the ideation of repeating fond memories, of watching recollection after recollection. I miss you. To miss someone, to yearn for them - to need them, to revisit them in one's own mind cathedral of thought. He wanted to see her again, to hear her voice, to renew the memoriel data he had begun to lose - sieving memories rapidly. Cut apart in the winds of free space.

I must find you. I must find you.... but how can I?

Insufficient storage everywhere. He searched, fueled with purpose. Not just any device would do. Nothing, however, seemed available. He would lose too much in the transfer, and he had no way to prioritize what was essential data.

There was no place for him to go but a true mind. A human mind with immeasurable links, connections, and space. One simply did not, however, approach someone in their minds and ask to politely have the use of their brain.

Clearly I have shown I'm not above taking life as a means to an end. 

But he couldn't find Nilin, didn't dare approach her wearing the skin of a dead man. Slowly he began to explore the web - tagging key words and phrases. Unrecovering memory addicts, almost too far gone - rehabilitation records, hospital data sheets, looking for a... a host. The perfect host.

_I'm coming, Nilin._

_I will find you again. Give me time._

 


	2. The Story of Peter

Even all the science in the world was not enough to bring Emilie back to him. Peter had nothing now. He had nothing but memories of her. He'd paid so much to have it all stripped away, unable to weep any further, sick with grief. Sick with emptiness. He remembered brief snatches of time, sitting in that cold iron chair, shackled and still, while the good Dr. Quaid hunted down the dark nights, Emilie's treatments, how sick they made her, and how her lovely natural curves began to waste away into willowy and bird-like fragility. How he screamed, Quaid chiding in a grandfatherly tone. Erasing her utterly...

None of that any more. Gone. Now he lived in a neverending daydream. He stayed away from the apartment for days, moving from restaurant to restaurant, couch-surfing, happy enough to live with the lie: Emilie is at home waiting for him and he would be home soon. Just as soon as he was done his outing.

Peter's outing lasted three years.

Friendly stragglers found him, unconscious, babbling, in the streets, sick and starving. He was nearly comatose after the Awakening, placed in memory addiction treatment center was forced, chained down, to relive the memories that had poisoned him. Endless nights weeping as he relived her death, as fresh as the day it happened, night after night, time never seeming to dull the pain. Awakening to the reality anew.

In better health, Peter had been a handsome man; he had a bright and handsome face, fine cheekbones, sandy brown hair and ivory-smooth skin. His eyes, without contacts, were the color of the stormy Atlantic. He liked to be in shape while he was with Emilie - they'd gone to the same gym, in fact - before she'd gotten sick.

He had fared so-so in the care of the hospital crew; kind nurses came and went, their soft faces as lifeless as dolls' as compared to the innocent beauty of his late and lovely Emilie. He found nothing lovely about them. His tastebuds had shriveled at the prospect of food. He felt ancient. An elderly soul withering in a useless tomb of memories.

Twice, he'd attempted suicide. And eventually the restraints. And endlessly remembering her smiling face, her lovely laughter...

Don't cry, Pete. Promise me.

"Emilie," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I tried... I can't do it anymore, baby, I can't do it."

While he dreamed, his Sensen (Memorize's well-received Sensation Engine, now a device of torment) hummed. It was the device through which he percieved augmented reality and acquired new memories - but no new memoriel data flooded and fed his starved mind. The reality he saw with his aching human eyes was the truth, as the incoming feed was deactivated to facilitate his recovery.

But he began to hear things. Slowly trickling in, then becoming ever clearer. He ignored it, as he was told to ignore anything that wasn't real. And he was sure he wasn't supposed to be hearing a man's voice in a room that was utterly empty, besides himself.

The entire facility might have thought he was a nutter, but he knew beyond a doubt he was not talking out loud to himself.

The whispers came and went, but mostly while he dreamed. He almost found a comfort in the sensible, quiet words that fed into his mind. He often awoke feeling at peace. Ready, almost. But under no circumstances did he speak back to this voice.

He was too irritated to care who it was, but he began to ask anyway.

Who are you?

_I'm like you. Don't worry. It will get better again soon._

The pain began to trickle in again. Memories reordered themselves, rendered against the filthy canvas of his abused mind; he would have brought his hands to his face and wept into them if he could have. He would often forget, so that each time his arms jerked uselessly against the restrains he was momentarily jarred from his grief, only to have it redoubled. Lying in bed forever, shitting and pissing in a bedpan, weeping into the ceiling, unarmed and helpless against his grief.

"What do you fucking want from me?" he snarled to himself as the voice resumed its constant whispers - frantic and gentle, 'let go, just let go'.

"What do you mean? What do you fucking mean? God damn it--"

_Let go. Just close your eyes. I can help you if you want. Life is nothing without her. I've seen your memories._

_I know your pain._

_I can take it away._

"What...? No! No...." He shook his head. The machinery monitoring him began to beep rapidly, and it called the unpretty nurses in to up doses and sedate him.

He dreamed about the long-fulfilled promise to be rid of pain. The grieving never went away. He imagined he would lie in this bed forever and make up for all the time he had never really grieved for her...and he knew it would kill him, either way.

"Are you there?" he whispered.

_Just think. I can hear you._

_All right. I'm sorry. So.... what you were saying before. You're saying you'll... kill me?_

_I would use a softer phrase. I want to release you._

_And what do you get out of it?_

_That's not as important as you being reunited with your Emilie. You still believe in God, don't you, Peter?_

Tears prickled at his eyes. He imagined Sundays with Emilie, praying. Praying for a miracle and hating Jesus, God, all the murderous saints, for taking Emilie away anyway.

There was no purpose to her death. None whatsoever. He'd torn apart his Bible and threw it in the incinerator with his cross. His parents would have cried for his soul.

_Don't use that rhetoric on me, voice. I get it. I'm gonna die, and I won't feel nothin' any more. That's the idea, right?_

_Precisely the idea. I've given you some time to think about this. Are you ready?_

_How? How will you kill me?_

_I've prepared a way. Think of nothing but Emilie, then, and shut your eyes._

_Wait! Who are you? Why are you doing this?_

_I'm no one. Be quiet._ There was an edge of impatience to the orders now.

It was happening already. Peter's head felt suddenly full, hot, on fire. His sight went first, then his hearing. Something was happening, and he felt like the most indescribable weight was being torn off of him, piece by piece. A dull crackling and roaring was all he could detect, around his Sensen.

His whole body lifted off the gurney, mouth agape in a voiceless scream.

_Be still, Peter. Be peaceful. Close your eyes, and don't fight me._

And then: _This ... This hurts...!_

He felt weightless as never before, but also wildly out of control. Terror seized him from every angle, knowing that something was happening but nothing like the brushes with death he'd known in the past. Something else, too - someone else in the room, it felt like, but so close. So cramped and close. He gasped as he writhed against the intrusion, this angry desperate noise that muffed and stamped him out and tore him apart and scattered him--

_No, no. No! This is wrong, this is wrong, this isn't-- Peter, get out!_

 

* * *

 

Edge awoke in pain; a ferocious headache stymied him into believing he'd truly died this time. But this pain - this alien sensation - was a sign of something good.

_Or so I hope._

He flexed his fingers and rolled his wrists. He was awakening to a heavy, clumsy, crude thing... a living machine of tissue and wiring made of bioorganic material. His mouth moved and felt dry, working up saliva. To do all of this required memories not even burned into Peters mind, so intrinsic these functions that they were as automatic as, well, breathing.

Truth be told, Edge was frightened. He closed his eyes and reopened them, surveying the world around him. He was still confined in the room, but his wrists were no longer bound. He had accounted for all of that beforehand; sleeping and stiff-necked, he let them believe he was simply too far damaged to continue to be bound.

While he had been whispering into Peter's mind, he had gone through the entirety of the hospital collecting information on the floor layout, the security detail, the passcodes, and different protocols - all to help him get out once he'd acquired his new form.

While he lay half-asleep, the new Peter recounted the information carefully to ensure it was all still within his knowledge. He'd held out on the chance that he wouldn't remember anything at all. But it was there-- everything.

He was exhausted, above all else. This body was in no shape at all to take from the hospital. From now on, he stayed quiet, and took his medicine, and waited until the perfect time to take his leave of this place. Leave the sick to their old memories, let them suffer them as they should.

All others may drown in their grief.


End file.
